[uClibc] wordexp interface / outdated software

Jochen Roemling jochen at roemling.net
Sun May 9 02:08:12 UTC 2004


Hi,

[ please cc me on reply, I'm not subscribed to this list ]

Today I compiled a "buildroot" with filedate 2003-12-13. Motivation was 
to compile ALSA for the LTSP image.
Congratulations for setting up this great work! I really creates a 
complete Linux environment. I'm impressed.

I came accross some issues I want to let you know:

1. The "Wordexp interface" is disabled by default in your uClibc. ALSA 
relies 3 times on those functions and hence did not compile on the first 
try. I don't know the reasons why this interface is disabled.

2. A lot of your downloaded software was outdated and no longer 
available (e.g. perl 5.8.0, valgrind, file). I was able to download the 
latest releases and modify your makefiles, but the ordinary user might 
not be able to dig into it.
Wouldn't it be good to provide a comprehensive list of downloadable 
files on your website,  download this list at the beginning of the build 
process and have the current releases / filenames of dependent software 
available? Or even better, provide an up-to-date "sources" directory and 
replace it with the current one at the beginning of the build? The 
reason is that e.g. the Makefile.SH.patch for perl failed to apply to 
perl 5.8.2. I fixed that but perl failed to compile anyway.

3. When the gcc-2.95 compile is interrupted because the disk is full 
(hey, next time please tell us that you need 1 GB of disk space to 
compile a 70 MB rootfs!), the whole thing becomes unusable. In my case, 
the busybox configure script crashed with some weird stuff ("gcc cannot 
create executables"). Of course this is not your fault if my /opt 
filesystem is too small, but you should maybe check the disk space at 
the beginning of the build and warn or fail if it is too low. Cost me 2 
hours...

That's all

Keep on with this project! I like it!
Jochen Roemling



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